Ben Hirschler

Swine flu is turning out to be a sales bonanza for drug companies - just don't call it a windfall, says GlaxoSmithKline.

As one of the world's top suppliers of both vaccines and antiviral medicine, CEO Andrew Witty resents the implication that billions of dollars of business simply fell into his company's lap when the World Health Organisation declared H1N1 a pandemic in June.

"For me the word windfall means you're walking down the street and something fell out of the sky," he told the Reuters Health Summit. "We've spent the best part of 15 years investing for this situation and our ability to manufacture and supply potentially 500 million or so doses (of vaccine) is all because of these investments."

U.S. healthcare reform is top of everybody's agenda right now -- but Barack Obama isn't the only government leader chasing a new deal.

"If you are talking healthcare reform, it's our daily life in Europe," Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Sorensen told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.

"Prices are being impacted, there is parallel trade -- all kinds of tricks that are aimed at reducing cost. Europe is very anemic at the moment."

European governments have been pushing back against rising healthcare bills for years with a range of measures including price cuts, and ballooning budget deficits in the wake of the financial crisis are not helping one bit.

A dozen Reuters reporters are covering the annual Reuters Health Summit in New York, featuring speakers from the world's leading healthcare companies, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, plus top insurers and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Follow the action as it happens:

Investigator Richard Adams of Cardiff University discusses the failure of Erbitux to show survival benefits in the COIN clinical trial presented at the ECCO-ESMO congress in Berlin.

Merck KGaA oncology head Wolfgang Wein discusses the CRYSTAL trial results with colon cancer drug Erbitux and the future of personalised medicine at the ECCO-ESMO congress in Berlin.

Investigator Steven O'Day of the Angeles Clinic and Research Institute in California still hopes to push ahead with a Phase III study of Roche's Avastin in melanoma, despite the drug missing its goal in a Phase II trial presented at the ECCO-ESMO cancer conference. 

Alison Stopeck of the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson says Amgen's bone-strengthening drug denosumab has clear advantages for women with advanced breast cancer, speaking at the ECCO-ESMO cancer conference.

Michael Ezekowitz of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research and Heart Center in Wynnewood, Pa. and an investigator on the RELY trial comments on the study looking at Boehringer Ingelheim's drug Pradaxa, or dabigatran, in stroke prevention during the ESC congress in Barcelona.

Heinz Drexel of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology, comments on the RELY trial looking at Boehringer Ingelheim’s drug Pradaxa (dabigatran) in stroke prevention during the ESC congress in Barcelona.